Barely 48 hours have passed since Australia has switched the faction of government from Labor to Liberal. No real surprise there, since the ALP has done a splendid job of begging Australians not to vote for them this time around. All the Liberals had to do was say as little as possible and keep their policies under wraps till the last moment.

Surprising so many of the pundits has been the apparent success of Clive Palmer’s Palmer United Party (PUP) in the House of Representatives, and even more so the half-dozen expected new senators from the so-called micro parties. So while the Abbott government has control of the House of Reps with a clear majority, the Senate is a whole other kettle of fish.

And that looks to be scaring the wits out of the main parties and their media mouthpieces, the mainstream media.

Witness the comments from Abbott and targeted hit pieces appearing in today’s News Corp and Fairfax press, and TV media, against some of these likely new senators. Melbourne’s Herald Sun leads off in the bottom-feeding style it does best, in its classy tome Six people you won’t believe could be elected. Ricky Muir, of the Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party, has attracted the media’s ire or horsing around with some kangaroo scat. He’s much more likely, however, to attract some mud of his own for daring to tweet that he thinks George W. Bush was the instigator of 9/11, not the official culprit Osama bin Laden. Too close to the truth? The Age sneers: The likely senator’s Facebook posts and YouTube videos, which have been made private since the election, include a hint that Mr Muir is a 9/11 Truther. If this is true, I congratulate him and encourage him to speak up about it.

The same Herald Sun article suggests that candidate David Leyonhjelm, for micro party the Liberal Democrats, is a thought criminal in the eyes of the establishment media. Mr Leyonhjelm states:

“…it is ‘objective fact’ last year’s Sandy Hook massacre could have been prevented if teachers had guns, and is advocating for a new approach to Sydney’s gun crime problem.

“What happens is that criminals don’t know who’s carrying a gun and they’re very wary of using a gun themselves because they don’t know who’s going to shoot back at them,” the ABC reported him as saying.

“In actual fact it’s a massive deterrent. You don’t make a safer society by taking the guns off the good guys and leaving the bad guys to have the guns.”

Even money says Mr Leyonhjelm’s in for rough ride with the mainstream media.

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Guilty of the lesser crime of not having enough money to fully fund her own campaign, Jacqui Lambie joined the PUP after running low on her own funds.

“To be honest I was running out of money. I don’t lie about that with people. I just didn’t have the money like the big players did for advertising,” she told AAP.

“I said I’m not getting this far and having it all thrown out because I’m too pig-headed to take somebody else’s funding.”

According to the Herald Sun, the former soldier would use her Senate spot to advocate for injured veterans. As she is also “fiercely anti-Greens” and against same-sex marriage, she’s a prime target for Fairfax, Channel 10’s The Project, and the ABC.

Senior Liberal Julie Bishop said today that the Abbott government may investigate the “curious” outcome of these micro parties gaining Senate seats. What does she mean? The government wants to prevent a few outsiders from challenging the self-proclaimed right of the major parties to govern unhindered. That sentiment bears some resemblance to the Divine Right promulgated by British king Charles I back in the 1600s. Worked out well for him…

The media and their politician friends see these people as “right-wing-nutters” because they don’t follow the political tide. These probable new senators ran for parliament for various reasons, but hopefully to try and make this country a better place. It would be interesting to know whether the same people now decrying the Senate voting system would have the same opinion had Left-leaning or easily controlled candidates squeaked through with only around 1% of the popular vote. A great achievement when it suits them, like getting a Green into parliament, but a travesty of democracy when someone non-mainstream gets in.

The Liberals are now getting worried that they won’t have a compliant Senate, and Labor/Greens panic that they might not have the numbers to block the Liberals from overturning their carbon tax and immigration policies.

4 Comments on “Flies in the Ointment”

Best thing we could have is no party politics in the senate at all, so that they can do the job they are supposed to be doing – making sure the legislation is fair and proper and doesn’t do harm to the people of the state they represent.